The House of Seven Fountains Read Free

bandeaux.
    The doctor followed her glance.
    “Tweedledum and Tweedledee,” he said with a smile. She had estimated him to be about thirty-five or six but, smiling, he looked considerably younger. Although he seemed to smoke fairly heavily, his teeth were very white against the tan of his skin.
    “I think I’ll get along to the washroom before the crush starts, ” he said, standing up and taking both their overnight bags from the luggage rack.
    “ Oh, thank you. ” Vivien wondered if she had been too hasty in her judgment of him. This morning he seemed quite friendly.
    In the powder room she washed her face and changed into a beige linen dress. It was not a particularly becoming garment, but at least it was cool. By the time she had concluded her toilet most of the other passengers were waking up. Few of the women had removed their makeup the night before, and the result was unattractive. Vivien felt grateful that, although her clothes were dowdy, her complexion was presentable in its natural state.
    Dr. Stransom was already back in his seat. He had taken off his jacket and rolled up his shirt sleeves. As she sat down she caught a faint aroma of shaving cream.
    Soon after breakfast the aircraft began to lose height preparatory to landing at Beirut. As they walked across the airstrip in the blazing sunlight that even at this early hour glared fiercely down upon the shadeless landscape, it seemed incredible that barely twelve hours ago they had all been shivering in the chilly dampness of an English January evening.
    To Vivien, t he following day and night made a kaleidoscope of changing scenery, strange costumes and unknown tongues. On and on they flew, over the Persian Gulf, across the measureless continent of India and so, at last, on the evening of the third day, to Burma and the verdant city of Rangoon with the gilded dome of the Shwe Dagon Pagoda flashing in the late sunlight.
    After forty-eight hours in the air the passengers were hot, jaded and badly in need of a bath and change of clothes. Most of them were still wearing winter clothing and sweating uncomfortably in the cloying heat. Even Dr. Stransom’s shirt clung moistly to his back, revealing powerful shoulders above a lean waist.
    The hotel where they were staying overnight was a large building with echoing marble floors and huge electric fans suspended from the ceilings. Having signed the register in her neat legible handwriting, Vivien followed a lanky Indian baggage porter up to her room—a lofty apartment with tall windows overlooking an enclosed courtyard. The bed was shrouded in white mosquito netting on a wooden canopy, and there was a comfortable bamboo couch beneath the window.
    The porter switched on the overhead fan, accepted her tip with a mute salaam and departed, his bare feet making a faint slithering sound on the stone floor.
    With a murmur of relief, Vivien stripped off her sticky garments and stood under the fan enjoying the current of air blowing down on her hot skin. Then, slipping on a dressing gown, she went in search of the bathrooms. At the far end of the corridor an Indian lad in a singlet and khaki shorts was squatting on his heels. He jumped up as she approached.
    “Missy want bath?” He grinned at her, his black eyes friendly.
    Vivien nodded and the boy opened a door, ushered her into a spacious bathroom and turned on both hot and cold taps. Then he arranged a wooden board beside the bath, made a gracious gesture, which evidently meant that he was presenting her with the finest bathing facilities in the whole of Burma, and went out.
    Vivien locked the door and slipped off her shoes. The water was very rusty, but the sound of the gushing taps was so refreshing that she could scarcely wait to climb in. But as she removed her robe, she gave a gasp of horror. The largest cockroach she had ever seen had emerged from beneath the bath and was crawling toward her bare feet, its feelers quivering threateningly.
    For fully thirty seconds